Submitted by Margaret Tragakis on the 2017 spring semester program in Granada, Spain…
Last week, our program had the entire week off for a religious holiday called “Semana Santa” Holy Week. It is the entire week leading up to Easter, full of parades and festivities. I was going to use this entire week as spring break and ignore the fact that a religious celebration was occurring in Spain because I am not religious and did not think I would enjoy or understand it.
Planning for this week took a long time and was hard to figure out where I wanted to go. I started in Lagos then Lisbon, Portugal for the first half of the week to celebrate a girl on my program’s birthday. I did not know what to do for the second half of the week, but then at the last minute I decided to just stay in Spain and go to Seville.
Seville is one of the major cities that celebrate Semana Santa. I went with little expectations and was more interested in seeing the city than the parades. When we arrived however, I quickly realized that the festivities would not be easy to avoid. There were parades, crowds and policemen everywhere. I was annoyed, but continued to explore the city’s plazas, buildings and so on.
On our second night, my friend suggested we go to one of the parades and at this point I thought why not try one out. We dressed warmly and walked up to the front row of the crowd. All of a sudden, men in long cloaks and tall pointy masks (like the KKK costumes) started walking slowly down the tunnel of people. They were holding candles and going silently, single file. Kids were walking in the line as well, the only reason we could tell they were kids was because of the size of the cloaks. Then slowly appeared a large float being carried by strong men. Slowly the float effortlessly drifted down the walkway. Upon the float were thousands of candles lit around a Mother Mary figure. After the float came the band playing the most beautiful song as they marched on. I was in a trance.
We stayed out from 11:00 pm to 10:30 am the next morning watching all kinds of parades. There were cheerful ones that boosted our moods, as well as somber ones that caused us to think. The experience of watching all of the planning, hard work, and passion go into this holiday was like no other. Not only was this a religious celebration, but a tradition, a cultural and social one as well. I could not be more grateful to have experienced this holiday so special to Spain.